Another fire proves fatal

MEADOW LAKES — In what has lately been a tragically common occurrence in the Mat-Su Valley, an 83-year-old man died in a house fire Thursday.

Alaska State Troopers say Iden E. Bush of Meadow Lakes was the only person who lived at the home a few miles up Stanley Road from where it intersects with the Parks Highway near Mile 50.

“Our initial call was that we did not have an all-clear,” said West Lakes Fire Department Assistant Chief John Fairchild, who headed up the response to the fire. “There was possibly an elderly gentleman that lived there by himself.”

He said the cause of the fire is still unclear and that the State Fire Marshal is investigating.

The structure was a log home with a few additions. Fairchild said a number of factors make fires in log homes hard to fight. First is that the walls are thick and insulate well, making for hot fires. It also takes awhile for a fire to get through the roof, meaning that the fire is usually burning for some time before anybody notices. In this case, the add-ons didn’t help.

“There were a lot of nooks and crannies we had to figure out where we could get into to knock the fire down,” he said.

The contents of the house also complicated matters.

“There was a lot of stuff inside the house, so it was hard to get around and get through it,” Fairchild said.

He said crews went inside to look for Bush. They eventually found him, but he was already gone. Troopers say they tracked down and notified Bush’s next-of-kin out of state.

The fire is the fifth to involve a fatality since August when Patricia Bosch lost her life in a home on Horseshoe Lake. Early last month, Hayden Martin, 6, died in a fire on Heather Way in Meadow Lakes. Less than a week later, at Mile 87 of the Parks Highway in Caswell Lakes, fire destroyed a home in which four people — Vannaphone Soundara, 43, Azrealle C.D. Stewart, 23, Akson S.T. Soundara, 4, and Kayson J.L. Soundara, 1 — were found inside. Troopers later said that not all of them died in the fire. And a few days later, a home not far from there exploded and burned, killing Julia Weber, 42, of Talkeetna.

It’s been a really tough year for borough firefighters, Fairchild said.

“It’s just overwhelming,” he said.

He urged residents to practice fire safety — maintain their furnaces and clean their chimneys.

Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan said that in his nine years at the borough he’s never seen a stretch like this, in terms of fire fatalities. West Lakes Fire Chief Bill Gamble concurred.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 21 years now and this is the most fatalities that we’ve had in this short a period of time,” Gamble said.

Brodigan, Gamble and Fairchild were all at a loss when asked if there was any kind of a common thread running through the fires.

“Usually during the wintertime it’s something to do with either heat tape on a pipe or a wood stove chimney that hasn’t been cleaned,” Gamble said.

But not these fires.

This week has been a busy one for his department. When he spoke Saturday he and Fairchild had just returned from a fire in the Horseshoe Lake subdivision. That one drew a quick response and did little damage.

Friday, the Stanley Road fire that killed Bush flared up again, prompting a second response. Some of the firefighters who battled the blaze a second time came straight from a fire that destroyed a home on Loon Drive on Echo Lake.

“It was right on the lake and it was absolutely just a gorgeous home up on Echo Lake,” Gamble said. “He had built the home almost entirely himself.”

Nobody was hurt in that fire, but firefighters were worried at first.

“When we were paged out it said that there was no all-clear, there were three special-needs children that lived at the residence,” Gamble said.

Troopers were able to go to local schools and track down all of the children. They also located the parents.

Gamble said all of these fatal fires are tragic, but the worst are the ones that involve kids.

“The ones with children just really seem to drain everyone a little bit more,” he said. “It’s just devastating for us because we all have kids, too.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.